Mike
Ashley on that supposed autobiography Hugo Gernsback: A
Man Well Ahead of His Time, recently published by Larry Steckler
(see A241): 'Steckler promotes the book
as a long-lost autobiography by Gernsback, but the more I've looked into
it the more certain I am that it is no such thing. The book's actually a
fairly complicated hotchpotch of pieces about Gernsback by various
hands, including Robert Lowndes, none of it duly credited; such stuff
that is by Gernsback comprises various articles by him reprinted from
old magazines, and so nothing new. I go into a lot of detail about all
of this, along with how my suspicions were aroused and how I discovered
what it really was, in an extended review of the book which will appear
in the next issue of Foundation. As a consequence, Steckler has
agreed to repackage the book and hopefully correct the errors that he
had perpetuated in the text.'

Michael
Chabon was interviewed by Julie Phillips, biographer of James
Tiptee Jr, who asked: 'Do you think you will ever really break into
science fiction? Or are you doomed to keep coming back to literature?'
MC: 'As for science fiction, it is literature, as you very well
know, dear lady. The gates between the kingdoms are infinitely wide and
always open!' (Washington Post Book World, 4 November) [KM]

Harlan
Ellison is hopping mad, again, having heard the rumours that
J.J. Abrams's new Star Trek film (please imagine a spoiler
warning here) will involve time travel arranged by the Guardian of
Forever, as first introduced in HE's 'The City on the Edge of Forever'.
Ellison expostulates: '... "City" and all its elements
EXCEPT specific Star Trek characters, belong to Harlan
Ellison – author of that much-lauded episode – by terms of the
Separation of Rights clause of the Writers Guild's Minimum Basic
Agreement (MBA), and if Mr. Abrams – with whom I'm currently on strike
– or anyone else, at Paramount or elsewhere, thinks they're going to
use MY creations – whether the City, the Guardians,
Sister Edith Keeler, or any other elements CREATED BY HARLAN
ELLISON ... they had damned well better lose the unilateral
arrogance, get in touch with me, or my agent, Marty Shapiro, and be
prepared to pay for the privilege of mining the lode I own.' [12
November]
Cinemablend.com
notes that the Guardian has been repeatedly used in ST novels
and comics, and that Paramount surely wouldn't allow its inclusion if
legal trouble was likely to ensue. Also, of course, the rumour may be
false.

Rose
Fox is not afraid to brag: 'as of 19 November, I am the
Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror reviews editor at Publishers Weekly.
Peter Cannon, my predecessor, remains at PW and is handling
mystery and thriller reviews.... I am pleased as the proverbial punch.'

Terry
Pratchett is alive and well: 'One of the most astonishing
things about going along to the Washington Literary Festival last month
was meeting the children's writer Jacqueline Wilson, an old friend, in
the hotel lift when we were all shiny and scrubbed up for the big dinner
in the Library of Congress. Once at the do in that lovely building, we
of course gravitated to the bar, though come to think of it the bar
seemed to gravitate toward me, and were shortly surprised to hear a
voice telling us to put down our glasses and head off to the
theatre in the same building. Put down your glasses.... So unlike the
homelife of our own dear publishing industry.' (8 November)

7 Dec  British Fantasy Society open night, Devereux
pub, Essex St, off Strand, London. 6.30pm onwards. All welcome. [Two
corrections here. First, I typoed 8 Dec rather than 7 Dec. Second,
although the BFS website has consistently announced the Devereux venue
– at least up to 2 December – I'm told by the BFS webmaster (!) that I
should have known it was really at: Ye Olde Cocke Tavern, 22 Fleet
Street, London, EC4Y 1AA, in the upstairs bar from 6pm onwards.]

The
Way We Live Now.Radio Clyde Breakfast Show presenter:
'What famous detective features in the Agatha Christie novel The
Hound of the Baskervilles?' Contestant: 'Is it Harry Potter?' (Private
Eye, 23 Nov)

More
SFWA Uproar. 'SFWA attempts to commit public suicide' is
Charles Stross's caption to
a
fiery weblog post about the return of the e-piracy committee
(suspended after a perceived PR disaster; see A242)
under a new name. Despite the urgings of an exploratory committee on
which Charlie served, this 'copyright committee' is headed by its
controversial former chair, Andrew Burt. Much
on-line
gibbering ensued.

Eco-Awareness
Masterclass. 'Several million tons of the Martian topsoil had
been ferried in as ballast some fifty years earlier, when it was feared
that the continuous firing of planetary probes and space vehicles, and
the transportation of bulk stores and equipment to Mars, would
fractionally lower the gravitational mass of the Earth and bring it into
a tighter orbit around the Sun. Although the distance involved would be
little more than a few millimetres, and barely raise the temperature of
the atmosphere, its cumulative effects over an extended period might
have resulted in a loss into space of the tenuous layers of the outer
atmosphere, and of the radiological veil which alone made the biosphere
habitable.' (J.G. Ballard, 'The Cage of Sand,' 1962) [RM]

R.I.P.Sidney Coleman (1937-2007), leading US theoretical physicist
once active in sf fandom, died on 18 November aged 70. He co-founded the
specialist press Advent: Publishers in the mid-1950s and reviewed books
for F&SF in the 1970s. Gregory Benford writes: 'Sid was so
much – physicist, raconteur, world traveler – and he gave much to
science fiction. His teenage toils for Advent: Publishers supported a
scrupulous, ambitious role for fans in holding the field to its
standards.'
 Peter Haining (1940-2007), UK author and editor best
known for some 150 anthologies of supernatural, horror, fantasy, sf and
crime, died unexpectedly on 19 November. He was 67. [MA] He also
published many single-author collections and scores of nonfiction titles
(e.g. several volumes about Doctor Who), and ghost-edited
anthologies for Peter Cushing and Alfred Hitchcock. His family announced
that he died 'doing what he loved – playing football and wearing his
Arsenal shirt.'
 Colin Kapp (1928-2007), UK author and electronics worker
fondly remembered for the quirky puzzle-stories collected as The
Unorthodox Engineers (1979), died on 3 August. His sf career begin
in 1958 in New Worlds, which serialized his first novel The
Dark Mind (1964; US title Transfinite Man); further novels
included The Patterns of Chaos (1972) and The Wizard of
Anharitte (1973). Kapp was professional GoH at the 1980 UK
Eastercon, where he famously delivered his speech in a spacesuit.
 Verity Lambert (1935-2007), UK tv/film producer who
debuted with the first series of Doctor Who (from 1963), died on
22 November; she was 71. Other genre work included Adam Adamant
Lives (1966), Quatermass (1979), Morons from Outer Space
(1985) and a 1999 return to Doctor Who. She received the OBE in
2002.
 Ira Levin (1929-2007), US novelist whose best known
works of horror and sf – Rosemary's Baby (1967), The
Stepford Wives (1972) and The Boys from Brazil (1976) – were all filmed, died on 12 November at the age of 78. A further sf
novel is his dystopian This Perfect Day (1970).
 Norman Mailer (1923-2007), celebrated US novelist who
twice won the Pulitzer prize, died on 10 November; he was 84. Much of
his later work has various fantastic elements, most strikingly in the
ancient-Egyptian posthumous fantasy Ancient Evenings (1983).
 Jerzy Peterkiewicz (1916-2007), Polish-born novelist,
poet and translator who wrote the afterlife fantasy The Quick and
the Dead (1961) and the sf Inner Circle (1966), died on 26
October aged 91. [DP]

As
Others Judge Us. The sinister evidence against a US teenager
convicted of plotting a school massacre included not only printed images
of guns 'from the Internet' but what police described as a 'devil
worshipping book titled Necronomicon.' (Boston Globe, 13 Nov)
[PDF]

Bad
Sex Awards. The Literary Review's uncoveted honour
went to the late Norman Mailer for a tasty evocation of oral sex in his
last novel The Castle in the Forest, where the relevant male
organ is 'soft as a coil of excrement'. Jeanette Winterson received an
honourable mention for 'silicon-lined vaginas' in an episode of steamy
robot sex from her novel which is most definitely not sf, The Stone
Gods. (Guardian,
28 Nov) [SG]

More
Legal Toils. J.K. Rowling approved legal action by Warner Bros
against the prospective publishers of a print version of Steve Vander
Ark's on-line Harry
Potter Lexicon. A New York judge granted a restraining order
against RDR Books on 8 November, blocking publication until at least
February. JKR: 'Given my past good relations with the Lexicon fansite, I
can only feel sad and disillusioned that this is where we have ended
up.' Merely annotating Harry Potter characters, locations, spells and so
on seems legitimate enough; but the Lexicon website contains a vast
amount of direct quotation from the novels, which (though winked at in a
web-only resource which even Rowling has said she finds highly useful)
surely goes beyond the rule-of-thumb limits for fair use in print. RDR
haven't helped their case by refusing to provide Warner's lawyers with
the text intended for publication, merely indicating that it would be a
'verbatim' copy of the website. This in turn caused a stir among
contributors of additional essays to the on-line Lexicon, who inferred
– wrongly, it seems – that all their work was to be included
without permission in the printed book. What a mess.

Fanfundery.TAFF: Chris Garcia won the
eastbound TransAtlantic Fan Fund race with a clear majority of the 174
votes cast, and will travel to Britain for Orbital, the 2008 Eastercon.
The other contenders were Chris Barkley, Linda Deneroff and Christian
McGuire.

Outraged
Letters.Everyone pounced on the A244
'Sue Donym' suggestion that Octocon numbers dropped suddenly from 300 to
80. The latter is OK for 2007, but the 300-ish peak was years ago in a
city-centre venue: 100-150 is now typical.
 Lise Eisenberg on Hank Reinhardt's death: 'You might
want to add that he was married to Toni Weisskopf, also a US fan, as
well as publisher/editor of Baen Books. It's sad news all around.'
 David Garnett grumbles that an sf-themed Open Book
(BBC Radio 4) featured presenter Mariella Frostrup dismissing the genre
as 'littered with strange creatures and robots that do funny things'
while the guest expert complained of 'beards, T-shirts with unamusing
slogans and real ale'. The latter, mind you, may possibly count as fair
comment.
 Omega on the magical fantasy kingdom of Coventry (see
A244): 'Reminds me of the Space:
1999 episode "Rules of Luton".'

Futurology
Corner. 'If we could have devised an arrangement for providing
everybody with music in their homes, perfect in quality, unlimited in
quantity, suited to every mood and beginning and ceasing at will, we
should have considered the limit of human felicity already attained.'
(Edward Bellamy, Looking Backward, 1888)

As
Others Used To See Us. S.I. Hayakawa on the failure of the
Ford Edsel: 'The trouble with selling symbolic gratification via such
expensive items ... is the competition offered by much cheaper forms of
symbolic gratification, such as "Playboy" (fifty cents a
copy), "Astounding Science Fiction" (thirty-five cents a
copy), and television (free).' (1958; cited by George F. Will, Washington
Post, September 2007) [AL]

Magazine
Scene.Fantasy Magazine (from Prime Books) has dropped
its print edition and continues exclusively on-line, though co-editor
Sean Wallace promises occasional print anthologies of its best fiction.
 Dragon magazine (Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast), likewise
digital-only in its latest incarnation, is again open to fantasy fiction
submissions – but beware. For just 3¢-6¢ per word they want
it all, forever: 'once your contract is signed, we'll own all rights in
your submission.' [JS]

The
Dead Past. When the Guardian/Observer archives
went on line with temporary free access, David Pringle was quick to
track down the first ever mention of J.G. Ballard – in 1956, as a
runner-up (along with Gavin Ewart) in a competition to parody regular
Observer features. JGB won a princely £10 for his spoof of
the 'Crime Ration' review column, then being written by Maurice (The
Exploits of Engelbrecht) Richardson.

Thog's
Masterclass.Eyeballs in the Sky. 'The porcine little
eyes widened just a bit and then settled elastically back to half-mast.'
(Jeff Somers, The Electric Church, 2007) [TL]
 Eternity Isn't What It Used To Be Dept. 'Even Eternal
Wanderings must come to an end.' (Lavie Tidhar, Hebrew Punk,
2007) [AR]
 Dept of Relativity. 'It had been known, of course, that,
at the speed of light, time ran backward. But nobody had made any
practical application of the theory until Johnson found that, beyond the
speed of light, one got into the time-drift, so that you could sit still
and let space come to you.' (Clive Trent [Victor Rousseau], 'Human
Pyramid', Spicy-Adventure Stories, April 1941) [DL]
 Evocative Cough Dept. 'Damiano followed, out of the
sunshine and into damp, odorous shadow, and as the chill patted his
face, there came a cough out of the alley: a cough rich, phlegmy and
spineless.' (R.A. MacAvoy, Damiano's Lute, 1984) [BA]
 Dept of Ecodomy. '"Yes, ecology!" Merrivale
made the word sound as though he wanted it to rhyme with sodomy.' (Frank
Herbert, Hellstrom's Hive, 1972) [AR]

Irish
Eurocon? Following the overly condensed coverage in
A244, I'm told that although a 2011
rather than 2010 bid would be possible, no Irish convention currently
has any plans to bid for a Eurocon. Or, indeed, for the UK Eastercon
(which would be an interesting first). [BM/JB]

Yet
Another Strange Voyages Update. Owing to the US
dollar's decline, this 1200-page CD-ROM collection of Mike Glicksohn's
legendary fanzines Energumen and Xenium (plus other
writing, an interview, etc.) now costs $20 post free in North America.
UK/Aussie buyers should add $2 overseas postage; $1 from each sale goes
to TAFF. Send either US or Canadian dollars to Taral Wayne, 245 Dunn
Ave, Apt 2111, Toronto, Ontarios, M6K 1S6, Canada.

Peter
Haining. From widely circulated family email: 'There will be a
celebration of Peter's life at midday on Thursday 6th December. This
will be at Colney Wood Burial Park, Watton Road, Colney, Norwich NR4
7TY, tel 01603 811556 ...http://www.woodlandburialparks.co.uk
'Family flowers only but donations can made if you like to
www.treehouse.org.uk .This is Arsenal's charity of the year supporting
autistic children, Peter having an autistic son and grandson. / Please
wear dark suits but loud shirts!'

As
Others Don't See Us. Christopher Priest belatedly discovered
that his 1981 novel The Affirmation was the official inspiring
theme of a London art exhibition running from 6 November to 15 December.
No one involved with this had bothered to inform or invite the mere
author.http://www.chelseaspace.org/